Part 26 of 43 Individual Scenes from ‘Rise of Skywalker’
It’s the lightsabers, of course. A recurring totem among Star Wars fans online is the prospect of a show with fewer Jedis, fewer force powers, fewer lightsabers. Often I think what these fans really want are original stories, which is a fine thing to be asking for (of course.) With regards to Star Wars though – and putting aside the estimable Andor – I think they are absolutely wrong. The core concept of the lightsaber fight is and always will be genius: pure visual storytelling, the emotions expressed in bars of light meeting and clashing on the screen. It doesn’t matter if the characters are talking absolute nonsense or the contrivances that brought them to the same place were absurd: once the lightsabers are out, it’s hard not to love it.
So it is here with the spectral duel between Kylo Ren and Rey that takes place entirely over the force telephone: once the lightsabers come out, it’s just good to watch. Assisting is the visual motif of cutting back and forth between locations both with smash cuts and by mashing up the sets, a genuinely striking bit of composition that sadly doesn’t make a return again after this point. There are of course bad lightsaber fights – lest we forget the lessons of Obi-wan – but despite everything working against it, this isn’t one of them.
In content: Kylo Ren has apparently immediately decided to flip back from supporting Palpatine, or at least he wants Rey to think that – we’re aping scenes from the Lucas films again, here riffing on both Vader’s appeal to Luke and (more tenuously) Dooku’s appeal to Obi-wan. All of Rey’s backstory for this film is crammed into this one conversation, with what is obviously cut material used to fill out some flashbacks. How else to explain wasting Prima Facie‘s Jodie Comer in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo as Rey’s unnamed mother, an odd diversion where she’s sending Rey down the river like Moses. Jodie Comer is then unceremoniously turfed out of the movie by Ochi of Bestoon, a man with a very ornate Sith dagger whose lightweight backstory strangely aligns with that of erstwhile Luke Skywalker love interest Mara Jade, a link between old Star Wars and new that I’m obsessed with even if I’m sure it’s not intended. Ochi of Bestoon will later turn up as a desiccated corpse in the Tatooine (or wherever it is) sands, destined to be the Constable Zuvio of this film, the impact of his absence felt more keenly than his presence. I wonder if they made an action figure of him.
Alongside all this we have the capstone of the Chewbacca rescue mission, a dire bit of treading water, the only function of which seems to be to clear long-time First Order toady General Hux off the board so that Richard E. Grant can fully assume the secondary antagonist role of being pleasingly smarmy but otherwise wasted. It’s unclear if Hux only managing to maintain his deception for all of five seconds before getting comically blasted down the bridge of the Star Destroyer is meant to be funny or shocking – along with Hux’s declaration that his spying is motivated entirely out of petty personal enmity towards Kylo Ren, the overall message just seems to be that the First Order is very stupid. Well, our heroes are the guys losing to them.